ALONG AN EAST EUROPEAN BORDER

This is a cautionary tale for travelers - an experience of delay and frustration at the border of Rumania, a Soviet bloc country, in the spring of this year. Both times we crossed the border, once entering Rumania by car and once leaving, at different points, we were delayed for nearly two hours, far longer than many other cars.

We were not harmed. We were treated courteously, in the most formal sense. Nothing was taken from us. Yet it was a daunting experience that told us something about the difference between East and West, and about being Americans in the hands of foreign police who regard Americans uneasily if not with hostility.

I was on a two-week driving vacation with my wife, Ann Louise, and a daughter, Emily, who was on spring break from a year at the University of Strasbourg. We had been rolling across western European borders uneventfully, as I remember doing 20 years ago as a correspondent and even 30 years ago as a peacetime G.I. stationed in Germany. When we drove from Austria into Yugoslavia, a non-Soviet Communist country, the line was four cars long. We showed our passports and visas (obtained free at the embassy in Washington in minutes) and were waved along.

At the Yugoslav-Rumanian border, about 50 miles northeast of Belgrade, it was quite different. Since it was early afternoon and since our destination, the provincial city of Timisoara, was only 35 miles away, we looked forward to sightseeing there before dark. There were two lines, one about nine cars long, one two cars long, neither of them moving. We chose the short line.

After a 10-minute wait, a clean-cut border guard in a khaki uniform who looked about 23 came up to the car. ''Is she born in Rumania?'' he asked with a glance at Emily. The twinkle in his eye suggested that he was paying her a flirtatious compliment. The question may have had a serious side, however, because the authorities in eastern Europe are interested in identifying returning native-born individuals who have left the country illegally. We said Emily was born in the United States, and we handed over three American passports. After another 10 minutes, the guard returned and instructed me to buy visas and make the required minimum purchase of Rumanian lei - $10 a day a person, with a minimum stay of three days.

The change agent refused to cash traveler's checks that were in American dollars until I brought my passport from the guards' shack. Then, I had to take the passports and the visa stamps back to the shack and wait for a guard to paste the stamps in the passports. It seemed to me like a minute's work. But the guard ordered me to return to the car to wait; he had a different sense of time.

Meanwhile, the sky had darkened, a light rain began falling, and a chilly wind whipped across the flat, open countryside. We wondered how long we would have to wait. We tried to read. We watched the way other vehicles, most of which had Yugoslav license plates, were treated. The guards made the travelers empty their cars. They searched each bag and looked under the engine hood and under the body of the car. They frisked the male travelers. One traveler said the guards were looking for guns. Gradually, the cars behind us began to roll around us.

After 20 minutes, the customs controller ordered us to put all our luggage on a cement bench for inspection. The controller, a stocky, middle-aged man with a methodical manner, went through each suitcase, patiently and thoroughly. He worked carefully and made some effort to repack. He opened toilet kits and looked inside zippered pockets. He felt into jacket pockets. Then he poked around the trunk of our car. He felt down into the hole that holds the spare tire, around the jack, checking to make sure that nothing was stashed there. Finally, he tried to lift out the back seat. It wouldn't lift. Visibly frustrated, he went through the glove compartment. Then he tried again to remove the seat. Spotting two screws near the floor, he sent for a Phillips screwdriver and a soldier. The soldier couldn't loosen the screws; he had the wrong tool. The controller consulted the senior border officer, who pressed the seat, trying to feel what might be hidden beneath it. He shrugged and spoke a few words to the controller.

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Meanwhile, the young guard had been examining our reading matter - The New York Times Magazine, The International Herald Tribune, photocopied chapters on Rumania and Hungary from a Fodor travel book, several novels, a coffee-table picture book about Montenegro. He studied each, turning the pages of the magazine one by one. The senior officer came over and looked at our reading matter suspiciously. Like his colleague, he was particularly interested in the Fodor pages on Rumania. Were they checking to make sure it was not clandestine intelligence? Did they wonder what was being said about their country on the outside? I asked what they were looking for and got no answer. The customs controller also took a good look at the reading matter, which he discussed with the senior officer. I sensed that a collective decision was needed.

The older officer asked, in workable English, what we were doing in Rumania. We said we were tourists. ''You came all the way from the United States to visit Rumania?'' he asked incredulously. He also asked where I worked, and I told him, but he showed no further curiosity about me as a journalist. If my vocation and employer had something to do with the border guards' intense interest in us and the delay, there was no overt sign of it.

The officer also asked what Emily was studying. He examined her school notes and took them, along with our reading material, into the shack.

We put our bags back in the trunk, and waited. After 20 minutes more, our passports were returned, along with our reading matter and Emily's notes. Having been at the border 1 hour and 53 minutes, we drove through. (The teen-age soldier who raised the barrier put out his hand in a stop gesture as we drew abreast of him. He asked for a cigarette.) We left Rumania by the road that goes to Budapest, a busier highway with more cars lined up at the frontier. Again, our passports were taken into the border-control building. Again, we were ordered to remove everything from the car, although the search was less thorough. Again, cars behind us were waved around us as we waited. The border officer in khaki was older, perhaps 35, spoke good English and was urbanely suspicious - especially when he discovered my pocket notebook. As he took the notebook and our Fodor chapters into the office, he said with a pretense of explanation, ''I am interested in your impressions of Rumanian customs.''

After a half-hour, we were told to enter the building. Ann Louise and Emily were taken to one room, where they were searched. I was taken to another room with two officers and was told to empty my pockets. Then I was frisked. One officer offered a small apology, saying they had a job to do. (At one point we were told the officers were making sure we were not taking national treasures or Rumanian money out of the country.) We were sent outside. I speculated that they were photocopying my notebook, which had the name and address of a Rumanian high school student to whom we had promised to send a photograph we had taken of him. The notebook also contained information about what we had seen, eaten and paid in Rumania. I wondered whether the boy would get into trouble.

Eventually, the border officer returned our passports. I said I knew that he had a job to do and that Rumania had problems but I wanted to know why were we kept waiting so long. His amiability gone, he stared at me silently. No answer. Having waited one hour and 50 minutes, we left Rumania.